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No Laughing Matter
Over 60 years in the life of an English family are covered as the author depicts the complex reactions of a family in which love and hate, interest and boredom, admiration and contempt struggle for mastery.
608 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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About the author
Angus Wilson
89 books42 followersSir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson, KBE (11 August 1913 – 31 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature.
Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, England, to an English father and South African mother. He was educated at Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford, and in 1937 became a librarian in the British Museum's Department of Printed Books, working on the new General Catalogue. During World War II, he worked in the Naval section Hut 8 at the code-breaking establishment, Bletchley Park, translating Italian Naval codes.
The work situation was stressful and led to a nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by Rolf-Werner Kosterlitz. He returned to the Museum after the end of the War, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life.
Wilson's first publication was a collection of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949), followed quickly by the daring novel Hemlock and After, which was a great success, prompting invitations to lecture in Europe.
He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk.
From 1957 he gave lectures further afield, in Japan, Switzerland, Australia, and the USA. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1968, and received many literary honours in succeeding years. He was knighted in 1980, and was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 1983 to 1988. His remaining years were affected by ill health, and he died of a stroke at a nursing home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on 31 May 1991, aged 77.
His writing, which has a strongly satirical vein, expresses his concern with preserving a liberal humanistic outlook in the face of fashionable doctrinaire temptations. Several of his works were adapted for television. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly helped to establish their creative writing course at masters level in 1970, which was then a groundbreaking initiative in the United Kingdom.
Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, England, to an English father and South African mother. He was educated at Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford, and in 1937 became a librarian in the British Museum's Department of Printed Books, working on the new General Catalogue. During World War II, he worked in the Naval section Hut 8 at the code-breaking establishment, Bletchley Park, translating Italian Naval codes.
The work situation was stressful and led to a nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by Rolf-Werner Kosterlitz. He returned to the Museum after the end of the War, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life.
Wilson's first publication was a collection of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949), followed quickly by the daring novel Hemlock and After, which was a great success, prompting invitations to lecture in Europe.
He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk.
From 1957 he gave lectures further afield, in Japan, Switzerland, Australia, and the USA. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1968, and received many literary honours in succeeding years. He was knighted in 1980, and was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 1983 to 1988. His remaining years were affected by ill health, and he died of a stroke at a nursing home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on 31 May 1991, aged 77.
His writing, which has a strongly satirical vein, expresses his concern with preserving a liberal humanistic outlook in the face of fashionable doctrinaire temptations. Several of his works were adapted for television. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly helped to establish their creative writing course at masters level in 1970, which was then a groundbreaking initiative in the United Kingdom.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 23, 2015
You know you’re in the presence of literary genius when there are large parts of a novel you feel out of your depth in. I felt like I fell into a torrent at one end and could only touch the bottom about once every 50 or so pages. But, somehow, I enjoyed it. Not quite sure why though.
This is the story of a set of six quite unique siblings from childhood right up to their dotage. Using this vehicle, Wilson comments on the influence of the times on society while also very successfully portraying familial influences, both good and bad, which anyone growing up in that generation will be familiar with.
In a way it made me think of a fleshed out version of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves although I’m pretty sure that he’d turn in his grave if he could hear me say that. The writing style varies considerably and is one of the strengths of the novel. This was one of Wilson’s later works and, as such, shows the full range of his abilities with some very abstract imagery, great dialogue and even long stretches in play form.
As long as you hang on tight and trust him, this makes for a curiously unified whole in the same way that a kaleidoscope actually shows you all of what you are looking at. But also like a kaleidoscope, you can feel disoriented along the way.
Through it all, the siblings battle on with their lives and there are great sections where the narrative really takes off. I particularly enjoyed the scene with Quentin behind the iron curtain encountering a young and less than ideal Soviet state.
But just as I found myself enjoying the plot, the characters or the style, Wilson would dive off down another literary alley and I’d find myself having to get my bearings again. It was all fairly exhausting in the end, in the same way as trying to hold your own against a chess master would leave you wanting to lie down in a quiet room. It’s no wonder Wilson cited Proust as one of his strongest influences. Thank goodness he wasn’t inspired by his verbosity!
This is the story of a set of six quite unique siblings from childhood right up to their dotage. Using this vehicle, Wilson comments on the influence of the times on society while also very successfully portraying familial influences, both good and bad, which anyone growing up in that generation will be familiar with.
In a way it made me think of a fleshed out version of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves although I’m pretty sure that he’d turn in his grave if he could hear me say that. The writing style varies considerably and is one of the strengths of the novel. This was one of Wilson’s later works and, as such, shows the full range of his abilities with some very abstract imagery, great dialogue and even long stretches in play form.
As long as you hang on tight and trust him, this makes for a curiously unified whole in the same way that a kaleidoscope actually shows you all of what you are looking at. But also like a kaleidoscope, you can feel disoriented along the way.
Through it all, the siblings battle on with their lives and there are great sections where the narrative really takes off. I particularly enjoyed the scene with Quentin behind the iron curtain encountering a young and less than ideal Soviet state.
But just as I found myself enjoying the plot, the characters or the style, Wilson would dive off down another literary alley and I’d find myself having to get my bearings again. It was all fairly exhausting in the end, in the same way as trying to hold your own against a chess master would leave you wanting to lie down in a quiet room. It’s no wonder Wilson cited Proust as one of his strongest influences. Thank goodness he wasn’t inspired by his verbosity!
September 28, 2022
3.5 stars. An interesting, overly long, sometimes humorous, character based historical fiction novel about the Matthews family, a group of unconventional, middle class Londoners, from the First World War to the 1960s. The Matthews family consists of three brothers and three sisters and their father, William Matthews and their mother, Clara Matthews. The book covers the family relationships and tensions, providing good historical reference points. There is a lot of entertaining dialogue.
The father, William, is an author who struggles to earn adequate income to support his family. Quentin, the eldest son, is a socialist and well regarded newspaper reporter. Gladys has an unfortunate love affair with Alfred, a crook. Rupert is a successful actor. The negative reviews of some of the plays Rupert was in are amusing. Margaret is a successful novelist. Her twin sister, Suskey is a happily married woman with four sons. Marcus, the youngest of the family, becomes an art collector and is homosexual.
This book was first published in 1967.
The father, William, is an author who struggles to earn adequate income to support his family. Quentin, the eldest son, is a socialist and well regarded newspaper reporter. Gladys has an unfortunate love affair with Alfred, a crook. Rupert is a successful actor. The negative reviews of some of the plays Rupert was in are amusing. Margaret is a successful novelist. Her twin sister, Suskey is a happily married woman with four sons. Marcus, the youngest of the family, becomes an art collector and is homosexual.
This book was first published in 1967.
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May 19, 2014This is finished in the sense of "I give up," not in the sense of "I actually managed to finish it."
I got about a hundred and twenty pages in, came to the scene where two parents drown kittens in order to get money, stopped, thought, realized there was no part of this book I was enjoying, gently put it down, and backed away.
I got about a hundred and twenty pages in, came to the scene where two parents drown kittens in order to get money, stopped, thought, realized there was no part of this book I was enjoying, gently put it down, and backed away.
November 17, 2019
Angus Wilson was once a well-known and well-regarded English novelist. He seems to have fallen out of favor. And yet some admirers keep his works alive. I first learned of Wilson in 1995 through a piece by novelist Margaret Drabble in the New York Times Book Review. She had recently published a biography of Wilson and was contributing to a Times series on authors "ripe for rediscovery." I was intrigued enough to search out Wilson's novels in used book stores and have collected six over the years. I've read a couple, but that was a while back, so I thought it was about time to read another. I picked No Laughing Matter as I've always enjoyed panoramic novels that chronicle the life or lives of the main character(s). After all, that's the story, isn't it -- the story of individual lives. I thoroughly enjoyed this story of the six Matthews children playing out with much of 20th-century England (1912 to 1967) in the background. Wilson relies heavily on dialog, even to the point of sections in playscript, and that dialog never fails to be revealing, amusing, and right. But this is not to slight Wilson's narrative prose, which I find flows quite comfortably as it details, denotes, and describes landscapes both exterior and interior. It could well be that you need to be English to appreciate Wilson truly. Or a classic American anglophile like myself. But I suspect that Wilson, like most fine novelists, finds the universal in the particular. Margaret Drabble said in 1995, "It is unthinkable that his works should be forgotten, when they have so much still to say." It's as true now as it was then.
May 10, 2024
This ambitious family saga is not an easy read. Covering 60 years of the lives of a group of disparate siblings, sion of an impoverished upper-class family, the narrative is divided in six "books" of unequal length, each gathering seemingly random scenes of the lives of the characters, with a background of historical events. There doesn't appear to be an ending as such, not even an open one. The story simply stops at some point, as if Wilson suddenly got bored.
The book shares many similarities with Life After Life and A God in Ruins, which I didn't particularly like either, although, of course it precedes both by several decades.
Beyond the often stilted and convoluted sentences, and the many typos (in my first edition, in any case) that make comprehension even more difficult, Wilson insists on jumping from one character to the next without giving many clues as to who is he writing about. At times it is easy enough to guess, at other times it isn't until quite far on, which adds another unneeded layer of complexity to the narrative. Sometimes Wilson also randomly includes fragments of theatre scripts that relate to the main story or extracts of diaries. But this is done apparently without particular order or meaning.
In theory, the premise of the novel is interesting and so are the characters and what they get up to, but ultimately it is difficult to relate to the book and, while some of it is amusing and there are glimpses of something really good, most of it is too opaque to really engage the reader.
This is supposed to be the portrait of a country in flux, manhandled by history, but by the end, even though the circumstances are different, little of substance seems to have changed for the characters.
The book shares many similarities with Life After Life and A God in Ruins, which I didn't particularly like either, although, of course it precedes both by several decades.
Beyond the often stilted and convoluted sentences, and the many typos (in my first edition, in any case) that make comprehension even more difficult, Wilson insists on jumping from one character to the next without giving many clues as to who is he writing about. At times it is easy enough to guess, at other times it isn't until quite far on, which adds another unneeded layer of complexity to the narrative. Sometimes Wilson also randomly includes fragments of theatre scripts that relate to the main story or extracts of diaries. But this is done apparently without particular order or meaning.
In theory, the premise of the novel is interesting and so are the characters and what they get up to, but ultimately it is difficult to relate to the book and, while some of it is amusing and there are glimpses of something really good, most of it is too opaque to really engage the reader.
This is supposed to be the portrait of a country in flux, manhandled by history, but by the end, even though the circumstances are different, little of substance seems to have changed for the characters.
August 1, 2014
A panoramic novel that stretches from 1912 to 1967 No Laughing Matter is perhaps Angus Wilson’s most autobiographical novel.
The novel chronicles the end of the bourgeois way of life as seen through the lives of the six Matthews children and their dysfunctional middle-class family. Depicting the declination of the Matthews family. The parents - Billy Pop and the Countess who are incoherent and impulsive creatures and they don't talk to each other - are objects of mockery to their children who promise themselves never to make their mistakes. Quentin, the eldest, is a socialist who adores women. He ends up having physical and psychological wounds. His enthusiastic views decreases over the years until he transforms into a cynical TV critic. He becomes crusty towards the end. He is also a fanatical patriotic. He uses politics - like George Orwell- as a vehicle to move across countries. Whenever he's on TV, he is reminding people of the degenerating time they arrived at. Gladys, plump and submissive, is unlucky in love and eventually falls for a crook and con artist named Alfred. Alfred the fraudulent uses her in his tricks and deception. She ends up in prison because of Alfred the deceitful. Rupert, the handsome actor, has a successful career until he fails to adapt to the changing theatre. He somehow has the Oedipus complex and hates his father. Margaret is a brilliant and highly acclaimed novelist. She flies from a relationship to another trying to live the modern woman's life, when sexual intercourse was banned before marriage, but deep inside she becomes bitter as her twin sister Sukey sinks into domestic bliss. Sukey wanted to challenge her past life with her family and creates a decent happy life with her husband and four sons. She is playing her part so cleverly the thing that makes Margret envy her. As for Marcus, the baby of the family, he becomes an art collector and believes that his career is his life. His mother turned him into a compliant and easy-dominant version of herself. She was continuously putting him down, while the poor lad can not read her changes in mood. He ends up as a homosexual.
It is always about the dubious and questionable success the six Matthews children accomplish, which is exactly what happened with their parents.
All their life, the six Matthews children, were trying to draw away from their parents and everything related to their past, but they kept coming back to it.
An ambitious and enriching novel No Laughing Matter is an extraordinary work in its depictions of complex family relationships, and what is going on in their psyches, where everyone struggles to be an individual.
The novel chronicles the end of the bourgeois way of life as seen through the lives of the six Matthews children and their dysfunctional middle-class family. Depicting the declination of the Matthews family. The parents - Billy Pop and the Countess who are incoherent and impulsive creatures and they don't talk to each other - are objects of mockery to their children who promise themselves never to make their mistakes. Quentin, the eldest, is a socialist who adores women. He ends up having physical and psychological wounds. His enthusiastic views decreases over the years until he transforms into a cynical TV critic. He becomes crusty towards the end. He is also a fanatical patriotic. He uses politics - like George Orwell- as a vehicle to move across countries. Whenever he's on TV, he is reminding people of the degenerating time they arrived at. Gladys, plump and submissive, is unlucky in love and eventually falls for a crook and con artist named Alfred. Alfred the fraudulent uses her in his tricks and deception. She ends up in prison because of Alfred the deceitful. Rupert, the handsome actor, has a successful career until he fails to adapt to the changing theatre. He somehow has the Oedipus complex and hates his father. Margaret is a brilliant and highly acclaimed novelist. She flies from a relationship to another trying to live the modern woman's life, when sexual intercourse was banned before marriage, but deep inside she becomes bitter as her twin sister Sukey sinks into domestic bliss. Sukey wanted to challenge her past life with her family and creates a decent happy life with her husband and four sons. She is playing her part so cleverly the thing that makes Margret envy her. As for Marcus, the baby of the family, he becomes an art collector and believes that his career is his life. His mother turned him into a compliant and easy-dominant version of herself. She was continuously putting him down, while the poor lad can not read her changes in mood. He ends up as a homosexual.
It is always about the dubious and questionable success the six Matthews children accomplish, which is exactly what happened with their parents.
All their life, the six Matthews children, were trying to draw away from their parents and everything related to their past, but they kept coming back to it.
An ambitious and enriching novel No Laughing Matter is an extraordinary work in its depictions of complex family relationships, and what is going on in their psyches, where everyone struggles to be an individual.
August 11, 2009
I started this while sleepy and got a bit lost in the extended interwoven dreams of the first section: I couldn't work out if the family were in Kensington or on the trail in America. I therefore determined to wait until i was awake before I got back to it but was on a rather active holiday so it got put aside for a week and re-started. Second time round it made sense, but if you like your narratives to be straightforward this isn't for you. There are continuing shifts of perspective and style and great gaps in the timeline (admittedly any significant events in these gaps are back-filled in later sections) that took some getting used to, and no less than eight major characters each with their own major role. So it took a bit of getting into, but, in the end it was fascinating.
The Matthews 'children' (well into their old age by the end of the book) are the product of a shabby genteel marriage between parents who appear to be at daggers drawn throughout their lives, but stay together until the end. In the meantime they make the lives of their children and their housekeeper/cook at best tense and at worse miserable and the book studies the effects this has on each of the children and their future.
I could see that it was well and cleverly done, follow the psychological development of each of them, and even understand why they forgave their parents in the end, but in the end didn't find either of the boys particularly sympathetic. Mags the struggling writer, Sukey the conventional mother and Gladys' sufferings for her lover were far more intriguing than the pompousness of war veteran Quentin or the studied interbellum queerness of Marcus. I also didn't really see the point of continuing the book to the next generation; the children didn't seem to grow much after their parents' death and it seemed more like a 'What Katy Did Next' bolt on - the bit that in a film would be a line or two of text next to a still of that person. There you go Mr Wilson, another format you could have played with.
Although I enjoyed reading this, I did leave it feeling relieved I'd finished rather than sad it had ended. Were it not so long, I might have rated it higher, and the rating may go up in retrospect.
The Matthews 'children' (well into their old age by the end of the book) are the product of a shabby genteel marriage between parents who appear to be at daggers drawn throughout their lives, but stay together until the end. In the meantime they make the lives of their children and their housekeeper/cook at best tense and at worse miserable and the book studies the effects this has on each of the children and their future.
I could see that it was well and cleverly done, follow the psychological development of each of them, and even understand why they forgave their parents in the end, but in the end didn't find either of the boys particularly sympathetic. Mags the struggling writer, Sukey the conventional mother and Gladys' sufferings for her lover were far more intriguing than the pompousness of war veteran Quentin or the studied interbellum queerness of Marcus. I also didn't really see the point of continuing the book to the next generation; the children didn't seem to grow much after their parents' death and it seemed more like a 'What Katy Did Next' bolt on - the bit that in a film would be a line or two of text next to a still of that person. There you go Mr Wilson, another format you could have played with.
Although I enjoyed reading this, I did leave it feeling relieved I'd finished rather than sad it had ended. Were it not so long, I might have rated it higher, and the rating may go up in retrospect.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews